Often on complex application sites, there are scripts that must run periodically (often nightly) to do housekeeping work. These scripts are often very complex and can take a long time to run, sometimes longer than programs like curl or wget will allow.

httpget will wait for a configurable amount of time (12 hours by default) for the script to finish running. It outputs everything that is received from the remote server for logging purposes. httpget can send usernames and passwords for basic authentication but it cannot hit SSL sites.